


Certainty

by mliz18



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Angst, Mild Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:20:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23555959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mliz18/pseuds/mliz18
Summary: "Thomas Shelby, god of broken and bleeding things."
Comments: 8
Kudos: 20





	Certainty

**Author's Note:**

> Hello I am reposting this because I changed a bit and I'm still not 100% sure I love it but if I stare at it any longer I'm going to go insane. Let me know what you think!  
> Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy as possible right now.

There’s a feeling that comes with killing. It tastes like relief, like satisfaction. Relief that it had been the other to yield, satisfaction at a task carried out. It’s a quick shiver down the spine, like the cold trail of a stray raindrop that has slipped its way past the coat collar turned up against the weather. It bubbles to the surface in the wake of the sharp snap of bone, the soft tug of skin giving way, the symphony of death rattles. Tommy knew it well, welcomed it like an old friend. For a long stretch of years he named the feeling wickedness, a seed watered with his father’s devilish blood, sprouting like climbing vines through his body as he grew into himself. Wickedness, until one day he realized. 

At the height of Tommy’s seventeenth summer, marked by the heat of the meadows as it rippled in the air over the tall grasses and the swirling dust of the roads as the vardos crawled forward on their yearly route, a _gadje_ boy from a village they were passing took a liking to Ada. She’d grown tanned and freckled in the months they’d been on the road, thriving in air that wasn’t choked with ash and coal dust. She loved the sun, loved the warm touch of it over her bare skin, and Tommy often caught her with her head tilted to the sky, lashes brushing the dappling of sun spots over her cheekbones, a contented smile curling her lips. _Gadjes_ and gypsies alike were drawn to her like moths to the flame, and while she took no notice her brothers did, split their knuckles against the cheeks of the ones who came too close, twisted arms back in their sockets until they heard the telltale pop of a joint springing loose. Harmless roughhousing, their pride wounded more than anything else.

It was a small village, the same as the dozens of others dotting the countryside that they were winding their way through. Women watched their passing from safely behind their curtains, eyes narrowed, small bouncing babies clutched closely to their chests. Men spat their disdain onto the ground where it mixed with spittle and dust. Children who hadn’t yet had the fear of gypsies whispered into them chased after the vardos, looking like small red-cheeked cherubs painted onto vaulted church ceilings, wide-eyed and squealing at the nickering horses. The boy had been one of a dozen pale faces pressed to the glass window panes, watching warily, disapproving but drawn in all the same. And it was through that glass that he first spotted Ada.

The boy trailed behind them for a few days, even as they drew further and further from his village, hovering like a ghost at the limits of the camp. Pale, reedy, and nervous, he watched her from behind trees and bushes, ducking when she happened to glance his way, torn between his deeply English mistrust of the gypsies and his new hunger. Tommy and Arthur and John silently kept him in their periphery at all moments, watching the way he hovered and hungered and wanted, a thin and trembling blip in their line of sight. He was soft around the edges in the way English children could be, with hands that hadn’t been layered with callouses and feet that were smooth as silk and not leathered and tough from the rough ground. His body seemed to carry no danger, so they let him be. 

But then one day Ada went off into the woods alone while she and their cousins played a game. Tommy didn’t know what game, a hiding game of sorts. It was early morning, and mist still crept along the mossy ground like the plush carpeting of a fine home. They hadn’t seen the boy yet that day, thought him still snugly asleep in his bed, didn’t stop to consider that the boy might want to play the hiding game too. So Ada went into the woods, freckles and tanned skin and curling smile swallowed up by the leaves and the mist and the thick sea of intertwined branches. The rest of them scattered as well, and for a blessed moment silence fell over the camp as they found their hiding places. And then a scream ripped through the hazy glow of the early sun, shattered the thin morning air, pierced the twisted wall of tree trunks. 

Looking back, Tommy couldn’t remember it too clearly. It was like a veil had lowered over the day, blurring the faces and the sounds and the smells. All he knew was that he tore off into the woods, pulled in by the scream, terror bubbling up in his chest. He followed it like it was a lifeline, a rope tethering him to her and her to him. He could remember the crash of branches and twigs in his wake as his brothers followed on his heels, a pack of dogs scenting blood, howling and braying as they ran. The scream led them to a clearing. The memory blurred even more whenever Tommy followed himself to the clearing, crumbling around the edges like the old stone of a statue when called to, flashes of Ada up against a tree, the boy holding her there, white-knuckled hands shackling her arms, her eyes wide as saucers in her face and fractured by fear. The feeling of Tommy’s hands digging into the boy’s shoulders, dragging him backwards, the sickening crunch of his head hitting the ground, the sting of Tommy’s knuckles as he brought them down again and again and again. And then somehow he was standing by the tree, his split skin weeping, pulling Ada into his arms as if she were three years old again and still afraid of what lived in the dark, his fingertips smearing blood over her freckled skin.

And that’s when he first felt it, the feeling that was shaped like satisfaction. It felt like burning coal in his chest and underneath it he could feel Ada trembling against him as he held her, heartbeat fluttering beneath her ribs like a bird’s wings beating against its cage, her fingers curling into the faded cotton of his shirt. His wickedness, rippling through him like a wave, but how could this feeling be wickedness, when his sister was safe and whole beside him and not broken open on the sharp rocks beneath their feet? The guilt and the relief and the wickedness clashed together in his belly, warring and snarling and clawing, on and on and on for what seemed like a lifetime, and he couldn’t untangle one from the other so he locked them away. But years later, when Tommy shipped off to leap into the blood and muck of the war, he let the feeling loose, and as it whispered to him he learned what it truly was.

Certainty, sweet as the crust of sugar clinging to the edges of a silver teaspoon, as a lick of thick honey swirled around the mouth. Certainty of the knowledge that a bullet sent screaming from his gun would travel straight and true, ripping through the air to burrow itself into skin and muscle and sinew and bone, power held between his palms, another life tethered to his as it flickered and faded from the world. Certainty, in a life that offered very little of it.

Nothing in Tommy’s life was ever half so delicious as that sense of certainty - he was tall as the sky, strong as a god, mighty as the three Fates standing over a quivering string with a pair of golden scissors dangling from their bony fingers. Thomas Shelby, god of broken and bleeding things. 

When they were young Tommy didn’t always know where their next meal would come from, or if his father would stumble home in time to usher them up to bed, but he grew into the knowledge of how much a body could do, and how much a body could take. Tommy learned and Arthur learned and John learned, and eventually Finn would learn as well. They learned in the scarlet storm of the war, amid limbs flying through the air without the bodies they belonged to and men choking on their own lungs all around them, the thick stink of death and decay cloying in their nostrils. The war melted them down and shaped them anew, watered the seed that Tommy had mistakenly named wickedness. They learned, and that knowledge sat differently between the three of them.

Arthur’s certainty sat alongside his guilt in the blackened depths of himself, stoked like a flame to be called upon when needed. A whistle, a shout, fingers crooked in beckoning. He tended to it as a mother tends her hearth. Sometimes it crept up, rearing its ugly head, horrid sounds and faces and the muscle memory of taking apart his revolver winding their clawed fingers around his throat. He buried them in Linda’s holy mouth and the little blue bottles that clinked together like windchimes in his pockets.

John wielded his certainty like a whip, cracked it across the faces of those who had beaten them down when they were weak. It simmered beneath his skin, bringing his blood to boil. Quick to laugh, quick to anger, teetering between two poles of hot and cold and never settling in either. So Tommy gave him a live wire of a wife to burn the trouble out of him.

Tommy wore his certainty like a tailored suit, fitted smartly over his shoulders and down his arms. A knight’s armor, the flowing ermine robes of a king, the holy papal regalia. It was what parted crowds of men in front of him, a sea of doffed caps and bowed heads because they could feel his certainty spilling off of him in waves. It was written onto his body, scars crossing his knuckles and old bullet wounds like the craters of the moon dappling his skin. Tommy savored his certainty.

He trusted in the give and take of nature. He didn’t believe in any one god, but he believed in that rule. The oldest rule. It was the way of the world. They took and took and took, snatched life from mens’ chests, bled them of it, pilfered what wasn’t theirs to take. Tommy believed in the give and take of nature, the balance to be kept. He had tipped the balance when that boy whose face he could no longer picture had dared to act on his wanting, signed his own death warrant as his fingers wrapped around Ada’s arms. And the balance had only tipped more, trembling and dipping and swaying under the weight of countless souls as they were snatched from the bodies they belonged to. There was a blood price coming, and they would have to pay.

Eventually, in the twilight of his life, Tommy would stand in front of whatever beings spun the world as easily as a child spins a painted globe on its wooden axis, hands clasped behind his back and chin lifted high, smooth skin of his throat bared. They would sit in judgment of him and his soul soaked in blood, and they would see right through him, through the tailored suits and smart shirts and the scarred skin. They would see the ghosts jangling around inside of him, twisting and writhing and howling to be freed. They would see the paths of the bullets tearing across the world, the cuttings that watered the soil, the beatings that ground bone to bits. They would see all that he had taken and they would see all his hands had broken. Tommy was certain of that as well. And that certainty tasted just as sweet.


End file.
